Diablo 4 Boss Knows the Day Is Coming to Leave Last-Gen Consoles Behind, but ‘I Don’t Think We’re at That Time’
Diablo 4 launched summer 2023 across PC and console, including the last generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles. That means it was built to run well on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, hardware now over a decade old.
Although Blizzard has yet to release new features for Diablo 4 that leave the last generation of consoles, and indeed the current minimum specifications on PC, behind, Diablo boss Rod Fergusson told IGN in a recent interview that the time may well come for such a tough decision to be made. Right now, though, with the upcoming launch of Season 4 and, later this year, the game’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, Blizzard is maintaining parity.
“There’s always a time and a place for when maybe it’s time to no longer support a platform,” Fergusson said. “I don’t think we’re at that time. But we have a long road for Diablo 4, and so we do talk about, ‘hey we have this idea for a feature, but maybe it’s not a feature our min spec or gen eight players can support, so it’s not something we can do today.’ But we keep pushing the boundaries on that.”
Fergusson and Diablo art director John Mueller spoke to IGN about various features coming to Diablo 4 with Season 4 next month, including a significant increase in monster density to make the action role-playing game feel more action-packed. This density increase comes with associated performance demands, however, although Blizzard was able to make it work across all platforms while maintaining a solid frame-rate.
Meanwhile, Blizzard just added ray tracing graphics technology to Diablo 4 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X. It is not available on Xbox Series S, Xbox One, or PS4. On console, in order not to compromise overall performance, this feature is locked at 30 frames per second.
“We’re pretty good at finding fallbacks,” Mueller explained. “That’s how we think of it. We’ll figure out a way to do a fallback, like if there’s something really awesome we want to do. I don’t think we’ve been gated by it. We’ve
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